I submitted this essay as part of the common application for undergraduate admission.

 I am reacquainted with social constructivism. The man across the table from me, a thirty-five or so year old professor, speaks. “Social constructivism is an emerging theory in my field. Basically, it says that nuances in the way cultures of nations perceive things can have an impact in International Relations,” he explains. As we converse over lunch, I reflected on the ideological sojourn that my fascination with International Relations had brought me through.
 As the child of immigrants from China’s lingually and culturally distinct Cantonese area, I was always intrigued by the elaborate interactions between different cultures and political entities. I lived in a distinct subsection of minority Chinese-American society, and so I had to constantly define myself with respect to the Cantonese paradigm and the other “standard” identities of the cultures I lived in. For my child self, learning how the parts of the world interacted helped me better understand myself and my complex social identity. And indeed, I really did think of my identity and my world as rather complex. My parents had raised me as a steadfast liberal, but just like conservatism, liberalism isn’t always precise, so at times the world seemed purely incomprehensible. Puzzled, I began investigating International Relations on my own.
 At first, any research of mine consisted almost entirely of conversations, but I eventually turned to literature, exploring the pages of such journals as Foreign Affairs, where a whole medley of perspectives and opinions congregated. Whether they were about power sharing in Zimbabwe or Australian pollution or emerging world powers, the articles in the journals I encountered each seemed to be propelled by its own unique ideology. Conscious and passionate, the essays articulated the apparent dilemmas of the world and their characteristic solutions to these problems. And as they breathed their theses, I began to visualize the social breadth that each stance on worldwide politics could have in our world, affecting me, my community, the friends who had moved back to England, the street corner vendor in Venezuela... Slowly, innocently, I began to incorporate parts of their ideologies with my own dogma, assembling my own vision of the world.
 The professor sitting across from me finishes speaking. He concludes, “…and although it’s a rather new theory, it has matured into a central role in International Relations.” Previously, I had blindly and proudly endorsed mainly my own beliefs, “Fungism,” amidst my confusion in understanding global politics. I had been familiar with the theory of social constructivism, but over the course of the conversation I had with the professor and through the accompanying reflection of the development of my political beliefs, I came to understand social constructivism and all other International Relations theories in the context of the field as a whole. In essence, social constructivism emphasizes the variability in the effect on our world that the ways in which nations frame and interpret things can induce. To whatever degree the individual perspectives of nations truly affect our world order, I find it undeniable that, in a parallel arrangement, the particular beliefs of people had altered my political alignment. My beliefs were a product of other people’s beliefs I had merely encountered, and my own. Each individual theory can have influence simply because people support them.
 I began to understand that social constructivism, internationalism, and realism—and all the other beliefs in the world—were all painters of the international landscape, our worldwide mural. Our world is not the portrait of a single theory, but the collaboration of a whole sort of worldwide and localized styles, movements, and passions. Our world is host to countless beliefs and perspectives, and every single one of them influences the structure of the world.